Betting on a new Broadway musical is like betting on a racehorse: the shrewd gambler knows nothing guarantees a winner but great bloodlines help. So, there is high expectation for Something Rotten!, a musical comedy about the very first musical comedy, set for the purposes of this showbiz fable in the 1590s, when all the world was a stage for William Shakespeare. The director and choreographer is Casey Nicholaw, who did the same for Aladdin and co-directed The Book of Mormon, while producer Kevin McCollum has won three Tonys for best musical (In the Heights, Avenue Q, and Rent).

No wonder Something Rotten! attracted such a sterling cast, headed by Brian d’Arcy James (the original Shrek on Broadway) and Christian Borle (Tony winner for Peter and the Starcatcher). D’Arcy James plays Nick Bottom, half of a playwriting duo who are eager to see their names in candlelights but whose talents are outshone by you-know-who. The solution comes from Brad Oscar as Nostradamus, who predicts in a classic showstopper called “A Musical” why the future of TKTS belongs to those who can act, sing, and dance all at once. If d’Arcy James plays Bottom as, in his words, “an Everyman that you want to see succeed,” Borle plays Shakespeare as a weary rock star, or, as he puts it, a “latter-era Britney Spears.’’

Christian Borle, left, and Brian d’Arcy James, right.

Photo by Ruven Afanador.

Both d’Arcy James and Borle starred in Smash, the NBC TV series on the troubled making of a musical about Marilyn Monroe called Bombshell. Er, are there any similarities between Bombshell and the behind-the-scenes high jinks of Something Rotten! as the cast prepares for its April premiere? Yes, but not what you might think. “The one similarity is that we all care about making the show as good as it can be,” Borle says. The big difference, he says, is that working on Something Rotten! is “a lovefest.” Since we are in an exclamatory mood, let’s make that “Lovefest!”